Rationality isn't about being a straw vulcan. If you want to make progress on issues that matter, you need to deal with emotions. In an environment of distance, people won't be open about their deepest issues. Building relationships between the participants is also an important goal. They allow people to create projects together. Having meet in person makes it easier to communicate via email afterwards. It's also simply fun.

There were both "hugs accepted" and "no hugs" stickers to put on our badges (and of course the option to use neither). A substantial proportion displayed the former, and I may have been the only one to use the latter. [...] That's a false opposition. These are two independent dimensions. At the academic conferences I go to, btw, people address each other on first-name terms on the briefest acquaintance, and I can't see that reverting to the surnames and titles of a past age would be an improvement. Different communities assemble for different purposes. This was a "community weekend", not an academic conference. Ilya Shpitser can call it a cuddle pile; I would describe it as a rationality convention: like an SF convention, but about rationality. A lot of what the rationality community is about is working on one's own rationality, epistemic and instrumental. That involves practical work, not just exchanging ideas and information and listening to insight porn. Serious technical and non-technical talks were given; there were also two afternoon-long sessions, one on working on debugging oneself, with practical exercises in groups, and one on "relating games". The latter is a specific thing that you can google. (None of the hits that I explored go into concrete detail, but I recognise the sort of thing that it is.) I went to the beginning of the debugging session, but dropped out after Kaj Sotala's introductory talk, only because I was finding the room stiflingly hot and decided I couldn't usefully function there any further. I didn't go to the relating games, mainly because I feared that everyone else might think I was out of place there, being well over twice the median age. I have done things of that general sort before, and in a group of more mixed ages would be inclined to participate. (This observation about ages is not a criticism of LWCW or the rationality community.)